Chapter One
Atocha Station, Madrid, Spain, March 11, 2004 7:30 a.m.
REX DALTON LAUGHED at Jessie’s attempt to order the coffee in Spanish. The barista was the picture of confusion after Jessie botched the number and tried to correct it. Plus, Mom wanted a latte, and Jessie had forgotten café con leche. She’d ordered either forty-five or fifty-four Americans and a café con latte. She was adorable, he thought, as he stepped forward and in flawless, unaccented Spanish apologized for the confusion and ordered correctly, “Cinco cafes, uno café con leche y azúcar a los otros, por favor.” It was to be a pleasant day, with the temperature headed for a perfect seventy degrees. But at fifty-five just after sunrise, the air was cool enough for coffee to hit the spot.
“Sorry, Jess. I know you want to learn, but we’ll miss the train if we don’t hurry,” he said to his girlfriend of two years. His dark brown eyes apologized for the laughter, though he was still chuckling.
“I’m just lucky you’re here. The poor barista looked as if he was about to have a heart attack!” Jessie laughed.
“Yeah well, I guess ordering fifty-four Americans instead of five Americanos will do that to a man.”
As they waited for their coffee order, he dropped a swift kiss on her upturned lips. Yes, she was the one. The future mother of their children, if she said yes when he popped the important question to her in Paris in a week’s time. Rex put his hand in his pocket and grasped the little box holding the ring he’d been carrying there for the past several days, to assure himself he still had it.
He felt as if his life up until now was just a prelude to his real life, the one he’d been working toward since he was a young boy. The year before, he’d graduated at the top of his class with a double major in history and linguistics. He’d immediately entered a Master’s program in political science, hoping to stand out when it came to applying for entry into the US Foreign Service, as if fluency in Spanish, French, Italian and German wouldn’t meet that goal by itself.
The culmination of his plan came two weeks ago, when he’d been awarded the Master’s degree. He’d already begun the process of applying to become a Foreign Service Officer by registering for and taking the mandatory FSOT test just before they were due to leave for Spain. He was informed that his results would be available three weeks from the date of the test, and that if he passed, he’d be invited to take the QEP, or Qualifications Evaluation Panel as the next step. Three weeks was just enough time to take the family vacation everyone in the family had been saving for to celebrate his graduation.
Today, they were taking a commuter train to Barcelona. Mom, Dad, and the brats, his facetious reference to his brother and sister, respectively four and six years his junior, were waiting on the platform. Rex didn’t want to miss this train. The beautiful coastal city, the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region, Barcelona, the sixth-most-populous urban area in the European Union with almost five million people, was a historian’s dream. It boasted a checkered history stretching back to 5000 BC. The name, it was said, was the subject of two different legends. The first attributed it to the mythological Roman strongman and god, Hercules. The second credited it to the Carthaginian general, Hamilcar Barca, father of Hannibal, who supposedly named the city Barcino after his family.
Chapter Two
Atocha Station, Madrid, Spain, March 11, 2004 7:36 a.m.
AS SOON AS the barista handed over a cardboard tray with the six coffees and four packets of sugar, he and Jessie turned and hurried toward the train station, two blocks away.
They hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when suddenly everything went deathly quiet, as if time had stopped. Hundreds of pigeons fluttered into the sky, and then an ear-splitting BOOM rent the air. Rex dropped the cardboard tray and clapped his hands over his ears. Two more gut-wrenching explosions followed in quick succession. He jerked his head toward Jessie, whose mouth was wide open in a scream he couldn’t hear. As he watched, she folded into an upright fetal position, crouched on the cobblestone street with her head tucked into her knees and her arms thrown over her head. The noise had seemed to come from everywhere at once, but a plume of smoke was rising in the direction of the train station.
Rex grabbed one of Jessie’s wrists and yanked her to her feet. “Come on!” he shouted. But he couldn’t even hear himself, so he doubted she’d heard, either. Dragging her a few feet, he realized she wasn’t capable of running. He thrust her onto a bench and left her there, now running by himself toward the station. In moments, he was surrounded by people running in the opposite direction, toward him and beyond.
He sprinted into the station building and flew up the steps three at a time, pushing the people streaming down out of his way, up to the platform where his family was waiting. The scene that greeted him slowed him down. The people he was seeing now were injured. No one was running away. Hundreds were staggering blindly around or lying bleeding on the platform as far to his left and his right as he could see, some bent over them and tending to their wounds. His steps slowed. The closer he got to where he’d last seen his parents and siblings, the ghastlier the wounds among the people he saw. And the blood and the dead with glazed over eyes staring at nothing.
His mind refused to accept what he was seeing. Bodies missing their limbs. Limbs missing bodies. His stomach rebelled, and he turned aside to empty it over the side of the platform onto the tracks below. His hearing began to come back, but he wished it hadn’t. Wails of the injured mixed with the weird wee-wah, wee-wah of sirens approaching.
Psychological effects of sirens on humans boiled down to three things. The strident sounds get people’s attention, cause a distressed feeling, and alert of a crisis or danger or death and destruction or all the above. The clamorous sirens at 7:42 AM on March 11, 2004 at Atocha Station, Madrid, invoked it all, at once.
“Mom! Dad!” he shouted. He’d come to the place where he thought he’d left them, but it was hard to tell. The station platform and building had been damaged, and the train sat canted on the tracks, three of the cars demolished.
Rex wandered, dazed and in shock, stumbling among the injured and dead, hoping to find his family and at the same time hoping not to. Maybe they’d gone inside the station? He ran to the building, but by that time the policía were there, and he was turned away, not allowed to go inside.
“My family…” he said weakly.
Moments later, one of the police stopped him and asked in Spanish why he appeared uninjured. Only then did he remember to speak Spanish. He explained he’d been getting coffee when the explosion occurred. He grasped the policeman’s uniform and begged to know what had happened.
“Terroristas,” the man replied, grabbing Rex by the wrists and pulling his hands away. “Vete a casa,” he continued. Rex nodded, though the command to go home made no sense to him, until he realized the officer didn’t know he was a tourist. His dark eyes and black hair, coupled with skin that tanned easily and deeply, could easily be mistaken for a Castilian, though at 5’11”, he was a couple of inches taller than the average Spanish man.
He stumbled away. There had to be a way to find his folks, but if he interfered with the police and now with medical personnel, he’d be arrested. With a sinking heart, he decided to collect Jessie and decide what to do. Maybe go back to the motel where they had stayed the night before. From there he would be able to make calls to find out where his family was.
As he turned to step gingerly through the carnage, he heard a faint call. “Rex.” He went on alert, looking more closely at the grievously injured bodies lying nearby. The sights were hideous — torn flesh, tattered clothing mixed with scraps of wood and metal. And then he spotted remnants of a familiar scarf. “Mom!”
He staggered toward her and dropped to his knees. Her open eyes were sightless. It hadn’t been she who called him. She wasn’t breathing, and he couldn’t bear to look at the wreckage that was her lower body. Oh, Mom.
There was no time to grieve right now. He looked around for his dad and siblings. They must not have been standing close together, he thought, as he couldn’t see them. Then a faint movement of the badly burned body nearest his mother’s caught his eye. He scrambled toward it, recognizing his sister only by the bracelet she wore. He’d given it to her for her sixteenth birthday, only weeks ago.
Horror-stricken, he gazed on her face, burned beyond recognition. “Quinn? Oh, my God! Quinn!”
“Hurts, Rex,” she whispered through burned lips. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as she gasped for breath.
He didn’t know what to do. Would touching her increase her agony? As he looked around frantically for a medic to call over, a wheeze brought his attention back to his sister. Her chest no longer moved.
“Quinn!”
But she was gone.
Tears coursed down his cheeks, and he threw his head back and let out a primal scream.
“Nooooo!!!!!”
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